Green Building: Going…Going…Green!

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A culturally sustainable town must have streets (not just the fenced in rear yards) that are safe for children to play in. Children can safely explore a world that is much larger and more diverse than their own yard. They can play safely in the streets with other neighborhood children without constant supervision.

Nature is ecologically sustainable because it is complex, diverse, interdependent, integrated, and decentrailzed. For our human culture to sustain itself, it must be founded on similar principles. Until the last 50 years, neighborhoods and communities had always incorporated these age-old natural values. They have been temporarily and inadvertently abandoned as we have accommodated ourselves to technology and the automobile. In HomeTown, the spheres of shared human activity are at once complex, diverse, interdependent, integrated, and decentralized within themselves and they bear these relationships to each other as each one relates with the other spheres of shared human activity.

Whether we want to or not we are designing and building homes in communities that become subcultures that either sustain themselves spiritually and relationally in health and comfort or they become places of social dis-ease and sickness. We have the power and wisdom to build safe, healthy communities in which children thrive and learn and grow and develop strong individual personalities within the context of mutual respect for everyone and everything in the community.

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